Veneers

Will Veneers Shave Down My Teeth? The Truth About Tooth Reduction

The most common fear about veneers is tooth reduction. Here's the honest answer about what actually happens and where the horror stories come from.

Key Takeaways

·Most veneer prep removes about half a millimeter of enamel.
·Viral videos of teeth ground to nubs do not reflect proper technique.
·No-prep veneers exist for patients with the right tooth shape and size.
·The amount of reduction depends on the goal and your starting anatomy.

This is the million dollar question everyone wants to know. Are my teeth going to look like little nubbies? The answer is no, no and no.

How Much Actually Gets Removed

The majority of your teeth will have either zero reduction or maybe within a quarter millimeter. The reason is simple: anytime we can preserve the maximum amount of your own natural tooth structure, the stronger the whole thing is. Your natural tooth is the foundation underneath the porcelain, and that's what gives you durability and makes these last.

Shaving a tooth down to a little nub doesn't even make sense. If your tooth is small and we're trying to increase its volume, that's an additive process. The current protocol is either no drilling at all or the absolute minimum, basically reshaping the tooth just enough to receive the porcelain and bond to it.

So Where Do the Horror Stories Come From?

The shaving-down horror stories come from guessing. To know how much of your tooth to reduce, I use a silicone putty index. It's an exact replica of the shape of the new teeth on the inside of it. I take that, put it on top of your original teeth, and now I can see the exact distance between your natural tooth and where the desired teeth need to be.

If you skip that step and just guess, two things happen. Either you miss a spot that needed a shape modification, and because the veneer has a minimum thickness, the lab has to build over an area that's already too thick, so everything ends up too big. Or you're not sure you've removed enough, so you err on the side of drilling too much everywhere to create excess room. That over-drilling is the most common thing that happens with people who don't carry the same level of experience, and it's exactly where the horror stories come from.

Done right, we do the absolute minimum needed to make space for the veneer, and we stay exceedingly conservative with the preparation. It was a big mistake on dentistry's part to aggressively shave teeth, and unfortunately it still happens today because a lot of dentists weren't trained in the contemporary way of doing this.

If you want to know what your specific case would require, that's what a consultation is for.